The present invention relates generally to on-board vehicle systems and, more particularly, to a system and method for determining which state a vehicle is presently in and for monitoring, recording and reporting the mileage driven by a vehicle in a particular state.
With the advent of vehicle fleet management and monitoring systems, elaborate computerized communication systems directed at automatically obtaining and recording vehicle location and a wide variety of other information as a vehicle covers its route, numerous on-board computer systems have evolved. The information collected by these systems can be used for a myriad of purposes which encompass automated customer billing systems, computerized dispatching, trip reporting and other such tasks. One type of information available from an on-board vehicle computer is the present location of the vehicle in terms of its geographic latitude and longitude coordinates. One particularly prevalent way of obtaining this data is through a global positioning system (GPS) receiver which captures positional information from signals transmitted over satellite.
However, oftentimes it is necessary to convert the raw coordinate data into a more useful form which provides additional information such as what state, city, province, county or other defined geographical territory the vehicle is traveling in. This information is particularly useful in various fleet and trucking applications such as in performing automated road use tax calculations as well as various trip reporting functions. However, even when coordinate data for the boundary lines of various geographic entities has been pre-stored in memory, the process of individually comparing the current location coordinates to boundary coordinate data for each entity, in order to determine whether the current point lies within that boundary, can become quite computer intensive.